By Brad Weisenstein

June 12, 2024

I spent more than three decades delivering local news at my hometown newspaper, a job and mission I loved that allowed me to do good and serve my neighbors.

It was a highly lucrative business. Until it wasn’t. I was shown the door, along with many talented colleagues.

Audiences and delivery methods changed. The local grocery stores and car dealers didn’t need our captive audience. It was so easy making money that we failed to figure out what most businesspeople knew about how to keep that audience engaged or supplied with a product they needed or to get by on thin margins. But Craigslist and Facebook and Reddit all figured it out.

Now taxpayers are being asked to support something the market will not, or at least not in its traditional form.

Illinois politicians just agreed to subsidize journalism, although Gov. J.B. Pritzker has yet to sign the state budget containing the $25 million in taxpayer-funded donations. Newsrooms can get $15,000 per reporter or $25,000 for a new hire. The governor also has a bill on his desk that pushes half of state advertising to local news outlets.

Here’s why Pritzker should use a line-item veto on the $25 million bail-out as well as reject the targeted ad spend.

State-sponsored media is the opposite of what America is about. The whole point of local news is to serve as a watchdog keeping government in check by telling voters what it’s up to. The First Amendment protections are to protect free speech from government oppression, but creating state-sponsored media is a form of assimilation that will quickly erode independence and replace it with reticence.

I knew a guy who worked for the Chinese state media. I asked whether he’d ever been censored, and he said no one needed to: He knew which topics to avoid if he wanted to keep his job. That fear grew greater self-restraint than any brow-beating censor could ever impose.

You can’t be a government watchdog if you are an extension of the government. And when the government repeatedly is listed as the nation’s most corrupt and has been that way for decades, Illinois especially has no business in the news business.

It’s not that we don’t need local news. I dedicated most of my life to trying to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable – most of whom were political elites. I believe an informed electorate is democracy’s greatest guardian. We need a marketplace for competing ideas to advance us as a society.

Our journalism exposed a priest abuse scandal a decade before the Boston Globe and Spotlight. We discovered the opioid epidemic in our community well before it was national news. We sent corrupt politicians to the federal pen for pay-to-play and for spending tax dollars on themselves. We exposed government failures to protect abused children and find justice for rape victims. We helped people cope with disasters, then dug into the failures that exacerbated them.

But recreating all that is just silly if no one is listening. You can’t direct people’s attention to what’s important with tax dollars, especially when media consumption has completely changed but the medium has not.

In one way it is just cruel to put local news on life support. Handing money to the buggy-whip manufacturers would have only prolonged the pain for their workers. Their salvation was in moving on to jobs in the auto trades.

Plus, the government creates a destructive inertia, whether in a state-owned tractor factory or news outlet. Competition creates strength and agility. Frankly, too little competition is what doomed local news and put it in the position that government feels the need to force taxpayers to support its survival for our own good.

Trust competition. Vacuums will be filled where there is a need and a clever soul and an audience. People will learn to be critical, to “consider the source” and to be smarter consumers of information without it having been branded by a 19th century publisher.

And those smarter information consumers will know not to trust a source bought and paid for by the government it is supposed to monitor.

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Brad Weisenstein is managing editor at the Illinois Policy Institute, where he guides institute content and ensures it is accurate, thorough and communicates the principles of personal liberty and fiscal restraint. For 32 years Brad was an editor at his hometown newspaper. His work with investigations, multimedia, special projects and opinions won numerous state and national awards. He individually won awards for his editorial opinions on where a poor community’s mayor really lived and with a farewell to the Illinois Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, as well as for an investigation into taxpayer subsidies of a shuttle bus system to St. Louis Cardinals games (Go Cards!). He lives in Belleville, Ill., and is a graduate of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He can be reached at bweisenstein@illinoispolicy.org.